


Therapeutic Talking

by Lt_Cmdr_Scribbler



Series: Doctor Tenor; Soldier Spy [5]
Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Andorian Biology, Andorians, Developing Relationship, F/M, Fluff, andorian culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-25 20:50:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13220991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lt_Cmdr_Scribbler/pseuds/Lt_Cmdr_Scribbler
Summary: Our occasionally prickly and always perceptive protagonists actually talk to each other about the troublesome emotions that have been stirred up by the events of the past several months.Or, the author finally ran out of patience and here is literally the most romance they can put in one part without completely messing up the Doc and Tyvaa’s timeline. Includes blink-and-you’ll-miss-it references to the episodes “Phage” and “Eye of the Needle” as well as the previous work, “Holidays and Heritage”





	Therapeutic Talking

**Author's Note:**

> Charan is one of the Andorii words for Father, and Tyvaa refers to her father Thelan ch’Quallath when she uses it. More on Andorian genders and culture here: http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Andorian_genders 
> 
> Kudos to ThatAdroitGeek as the most patient beta-reader ever :)

As Tyvaa entered Sickbay after waving a brief good-bye to Kes at the door, she was fully aware of the melancholic droop of her antennae and the almost sad smile adorning her face, but she tried her best to straighten herself up as she bustled around the storage unit, taking inventory. When she entered the CMO’s office, she realized she must’ve been more distracted than she first assumed, because she collided with the Doctor’s solid chest. Startled, she took a large step back, but only succeeded in introducing her back to the bulkhead behind her.

Noting her discomfort, the Doctor stepped back slightly. He asked, “L—Tyvaa. Are you alright?”

She tried not to grimace at the question, but she saw the way his dark brown eyes flicked up to her antennae as they curled inward in discomfort. “There’s nothing serious to worry about,” Tyvaa deflected, plastering a smile on her face.

The Doctor’s narrowed eyes clearly didn’t believe her, but his shoulders slumped slightly as if in resignation and he nodded shortly, neither dismissing nor truly accepting her platitude. “So long as you don’t become physically ill,” he muttered, returning to the computer at the desk.

Tyvaa hummed slightly at the remark. “Speaking of that, how many baseline check-ups are there to complete? I know the Engineering section took a while, but to my account there’s only—“

“Yourself, Lieutenant Torres, and Commander Chakotay left, yes,” the Doctor curtly interrupted, not looking up from the screen. “Given that your last official checkup was over a year ago, I can see that you’ve missed a few precautionary injections. Not having the Commander or the Lieutenant’s records, I don’t want to speculate on their wellbeing until after an examination.”

“There were medical staff in the Maquis, you know,” Tyvaa shot back. The complaints were something familiar to respond to, and her shoulders and antennae relaxed back into her usual comfortable stance. She continued, “They weren’t galaxy-class surgeons or anything, but there weren’t any epidemics and anyone with an injury was usually on the mend within days.”

That got the Doctor to look up from then console, if only to roll his eyes at her. “Then humor me, L—Tyvaa. Once the entire crew is immunized to Starfleet regulations, there will be one less trivial matter to occupy my time.”

“Is Sandrine’s too trivial as well, Doctor?” Tyvaa asked lightly, her tone hiding the twinge of sorrow in her chest. She had fallen into the habit of spending her holodeck time with him, and she'd enjoyed teaching her holographic friend how to play pool and which drinks were the most popular among the crewmen. With another spark of sadness, she realized that she would miss it; the feeling of teaching the Doctor something for once rather than the other way around.

There was something stiffer in the set of the Doctor’s jaw when he answered, “Now that the crew is not about abandon the ship through a wormhole the size of your fist, I find that there are more duties that need my attention.”

Tyvaa’s eyebrows and antennae arched in surprise. His twitchy irritation made her fingers feel restless, like he was projecting his emotions. But holograms shouldn’t be able to do that, and even if he could, Tyvaa shouldn’t be able to pick up on something so repressed behind his layers of professionalism subroutines. But it was there, as clear and familiar as the constant stress rolling off of Captain Janeway during senior officer meetings.

The word “abandon” caught her attention the most, and guilt squeezed her heart for a moment as she remembered the brief inner debate about visiting the Doctor to say good-bye. Since everything had still been up in the air about whether or not the wormhole would really work, Tyvaa had decided against it. Now, she could see where the Doctor felt slighted: the one person he talked to on a daily basis had almost vanished without a trace.

In her moment of consideration, Tyvaa had picked up a medical tricorder to fiddle with. Now, she closed the device and placed it on the Doctor’s desk firmly enough to draw his attention. His head snapped up, his gaze still a little accusatory and his mouth pressed into a hard line, but Tyvaa hesitantly smiled.

“Should I have to make an appointment for my annual physical when I’m already in Sickbay?” she asked, widening her smile and extending her antennae amicably. She hoped that he could tell that she wanted to make amends, but from the way he sighed with resignation and walked stiffly beside her as they entered the larger half of Sickbay, Tyvaa could only assume that the jury was still out for her.

Tyvaa sat on a biobed without prompting, and laced her hands together in her lap. The brief reminder of holding the Doctor’s hand twice now flickered through her mind, fiercely triumphant as he explained how holographic lungs could work and then quietly reassuring her as they sat together in the soft lighting of Sandrine’s, but she pushed the too-pleasant thoughts out of her head. _Friendly professionalism only,_ she told herself sternly. _You work together daily, for stars’ sake. Don’t make it weird._

The Doctor held the medical tricorder in one hand, and a PADD in the other. He frequently glanced between the two, comparing the current results to Tyvaa’s last official Starfleet physical. A particularly deep furrow began to grow across the Doctor’s brow, and Tyvaa clenched her hands tighter together to keep from fidgeting at that look. Before she could even ask what was wrong, the Doctor handed the PADD to her while pointing emphatically to something on the screen.

“That is not normal for an Andorian brain, but your prior physicals don’t mention it at all. What is it?” He demanded.

For a moment Tyvaa looked at the PADD without comprehending, but a sad smile turned the corner of her mouth upward as she realized just what the Doctor pointed at. A scan of her cranium was lit up, and the indicated area, which was near the front-underside of her brain, was a familiar sight to Tyvaa.

“Those are the lobes of my brain that allow for my minor telepathic abilities,” explained Tyvaa. “My charan’s—I mean, my father’s mother’s mother was one of the last true Aenar. Charan inherited half of his mother’s telepathic power, and with my human mother, I inherited less than half of his. I only get impressions, and usually only very strong ones.”

The Doctor stood still, his dark brown gaze staring intently at her face. Finally, he looked away and murmured, almost apologetically, “I didn’t know.”

“It’s not your fault. You’d think that in almost three hundred years someone would’ve acknowledged the Aenar as something more than a ‘genetic anomaly’ but no, stars forbid that new medical terminology be invented to allow for an entire subspecies.” Tyvaa found herself channeling the dryness of her medical professors on Andoria, an entire decade ago, and smiled at the simplicity of the memory.

“Not that. I—You have a family to return to. I didn’t know,” he repeated, before briefly shaking himself and resuming the scan. Tyvaa frowned and stopped his hand with her own, staring him in the face until he made eye contact with her.

She spoke gently, but her voice shook a little as she tried not to notice the small distance between them, or how her hand rested against his, or how wide his so very dark eyes had gotten, or anything else for that matter. “Hey, now. Don’t—don’t act like that excuses me for the whole not-saying-goodbye thing. I haven’t seen my charan or my brother in person for almost six years, but you’re one of the best friends I have out here, Doc. I should’ve told you.”

Tyvaa leaned back, speaking louder and more clearly with a shaky smile. “And don’t you start with that _I’m a hologram, I can’t be a friend_ nonsense. Or do I need to get Kes in here and have her talk to you, too? I know her pleading puppy eyes are better than mine, maybe she’ll get you to listen.”

The gentle jibe brought a small, soft smile to the Doctor’s face, and a hesitant sort of relief fluttered in Tyvaa’s stomach. The spot where their hands met atop the tricorder felt warm, despite the fact that the Doctor’s simulated “human” skin temperature was cooler than hers. She was suddenly all too aware of how his hand felt against hers, and she pulled away even as her face flushed deep blue and her antennae stood stiff with embarrassment.

“Thank you, Tyvaa,” the Doctor said. The little creases at the corners of his eyes spoke more words than that, effusive and hurtling into verbosity, and Tyvaa felt the fragile, hopeful feeling in her stomach intensify.

He resumed scanning her with the tricorder, but occasionally he would meet her gaze and smile slightly, as if the two of them were in on the same secret. Tyvaa couldn’t stop the infectious smile spreading across her own face, so it didn’t seem far from the truth. Over the course of the physical, which involved a few more scans and the Doctor making a joke about stethoscopes that only left Tyvaa bemused, she was relieved to have returned to their usual playful, back-and-forth banter.

After the Doctor put the tricorder away, he turned to her with a concerned look. “Tyvaa,” he began haltingly, “when you came in today, you didn’t—you seemed distressed. Is there—are you alright?”

She was tempted to deflect on the issue again, but the Doctor’s gaze hardened into the kind of look that could pin someone to a wall, and so she relented.

“I was reminiscing with Kes over breakfast about my family, and I thought a little too hard about mortality,” explained Tyvaa. She chuckled without mirth. “It sounds absurd when I phrase it like that, doesn’t it?”

Standing up from the biobed, Tyvaa crossed her arms over her chest as if to battle the discomfort that accompanied the topic. “My brother Eten had just been bonded to his second partner before I had gone undercover, and I started wondering if he had any children yet. Our mother, she died shortly into my childhood. She had been a part of Starfleet before marrying Charan. I suppose that I started to realize that the life expectancy for stranded Starfleet officers is… not great, to say the least. It hit me a little too hard, I suppose.”

The Doctor wore the kind of frown that Tyvaa called his “problem solving look.” It usually made an appearance when he was searching for something uncharacteristically comforting to say or when he was puzzling out the best way to solve an unprecedented medical issue like missing Talaxian lungs. She smiled slightly to see it, and patted the Doctor on the shoulder.

“Like I said before, it’s nothing to worry over,” she assured him. “I just needed to focus, get my head on straight, and I’ll be fine.”

He seemed to briefly hesitate, but he offered, “Do you want a… hug? It seems like what a- a friend would do.” The words seemed to spill out of him as if against his better judgement, but his brown eyes gazed at Tyvaa expectantly. She shivered under the weight of his gaze, but she couldn't help the almost foolishly wide grin that bloomed across her face at the thought of an embrace.

“I’d like that,” answered Tyvaa.

She wrapped her arms around him, hooking her elbows over his shoulders and burying her face in his shoulder. Tyvaa inhaled deeply, and let a hidden smile steal over her face. As a hologram, he didn’t have a scent or the same kind of physical presence, but he didn’t feel like empty space, either. The Doctor was solid: his uniform felt like fabric, and Tyvaa could fool herself into thinking that he had skin and sinew underneath it. As he hesitantly wrapped his arms around her waist, Tyvaa smiled wider and nodded against his shoulder. With more confidence, the Doctor hugged her tightly, and she delighted in the feeling of the comforting weight anchoring her in the current moment, almost shielding her from her anxieties.

Just as Tyvaa was getting a lid on her urge to grin so wide that her cheeks hurt, the Doctor tried to lean back slightly, and only succeeded in pulling Tyvaa slightly along with him. She took the hint and immediately released her arms from around his shoulders, although the urge to smile intensified at the flustered expression on the Doctor’s face.

“Now, I believe we can fit two more physicals in today. I’ll leave it to you to wrangle Commander Chakotay and Lieutenant Torres into compliance,” declared the Doctor with an unexpectedly sly smile.

The sparkle in her friend’s eyes started a laugh out of Tyvaa, and while as she left Sickbay to convince the two most hypospray-intolerant people she knew to come and be poked and prodded, she would’ve sworn that the warm bubble in her chest had her walking on air all the way down to Engineering.


End file.
